Relationship to MetaFormer.
The design of EfficientFormer is partly inspired by the MetaFormer concept [1]}.
Compared to PoolFormer, EfficientFormer addresses the dimension mismatch problem, which is a root cause of inefficient edge inference, thus being capable of utilizing global MHSA without sacrificing speed. Consequently, EfficientFormer exhibits advantageous accuracy performance over PoolFormer.
In spite of its fully 4D design, PoolFormer employs inefficient patch embedding and group normalization (Fig. REF ), leading to increased latency.
Instead, our redesigned 4D partition of EfficientFormer (Fig. REF ) is more hardware friendly and exhibits better performance across several tasks.
